Sunday, 20 February 2011

It may be good like it who list..but I do dowbt who can me blame ..for oft assured yet have I myst ..and now again I fere thesame..The wyndy worde[s] the Ies quaynt game ..of soden chaunge maketh me agast ..for dred to fall I stond not fastAlas I tred an endles maze..that seketh to accorde two contraries ..and hope still & nothing hase..imprisoned in liberte[s] ..as oon unhard & and still that cries ..alwaies thursty & yet nothing I tast..for dred to fall I stond not fastAssured I dowbt I be not sure ..and should I trust to suche suretie ..that oft hath put the prouff in ure..and never hath founde it trusty ..nay sir In faith it were great foly ..and yet my liff thus I do wast..for dred to fall I stond not fast

Hase hazard, attempture use

Illustration of "the nurse" on Droste cocoa tin, showing a visual form of recursion known as the Droste effect; the woman in the image is holding an object which contains a smaller image of herself holding the same object, and so forth: Jan (Johannes) Musset (?), c. 1903

ThomasWyatt(1503-1542):It may be good like itwho list:transcription from original text (British Library Egerton MS 2711, fol. 22) by Richard Harrier in The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poetry,1975

They say it's wise to trust in one's friends, and I think this is doubly wise for the old-timers in the gang, who can always use every bit of help they (i.e. I) can get-- even (especially?) with the little things -- I mean everybody gets the humour in watching a half-blind old person fumble with cash register change, shoelace tying & c. -- but since when does anybody offer a helping hand.

In short, I am greatly indebted to you, my friend, for your poet's eagle eye in spotting that (now gratefully-corrected) typo -- my errant transcription of a transcription of a transcription (it's not clear whether the handwriting in the Egerton ms. is actually Wyatt's, or that of an intermediary).

Anyhow, the impression here is that the closer one can come to seeing the thing in something like its original state, the closer one then comes to having a sense of the reality of the compositional moment.

In this case, another uneasy moment in the short, extremely eventful, certainly often anxious and perilous, life of one of the very greatest of poets.

(By the by, on the subject of editorial "corrections" of Wyatt's texts, those depredations have been doing on since a few years after his premature demise, when the anthologist Richard Tottel "regularized" -- i.e. destroyed -- his unique, original and very effective metrical conception and practise... and this steady corruption of the texts has continued down through the centuries to now, when it's assumed, even inside the jello-firm bastions of academia, that the original look of the poems will put off dumb American students; my view is that condescending to and patronizing audiences in this way is a sure sign of the failure of the culture built upon this language; but oh well, & c.)

Like the other correspondents, I find Wyatt's poem stunning and very moving. Two nights ago, I watched the most wretched reality show I'd ever seen featuring the comedian Joan Rivers, her daughter Melissa and various extra appendages seeking the "big time" in a reality tv show on the WE network. Ever since then, I can't get the phrase "imitation of life" off my mind. The Wyatt poem (and the two ladies) brought me back to something real and fine.

Thought I sent something like this comment yesterday (but it's not here, helas) -- good to see old Wyatt still standing fast in 'original' spelling (if not hand writing, which I once read in person in the reading room of the British Museum), in lovely company of these chocolate girls. . . .

The comments earlier re. art in advertising had set me off on a Douglas Sirk "Written on the Wind" Fifties-research digression into Mad Ave Nowhere.

(I suppose I was thinking of the scenes of the ad layouts being shown in the lofty high rise skyscraper aerie offices.)

(This must be Fears and Phobias Week around here.)

Stephen,

For a pleasant longish moment of senior dementia I took you as saying you had read the Egerton manuscript in the reading room in lovely company of these chocolate girls.

In fact as there's no harm in persisting in taking you as having said that...

I'm still trying to get over the strange Drostean Coincidence by which a drinker of Droste should be found looking at a post containing an image of a girl serving Droste, & c., itself a seeming proof of the existence in the universe of infinite loops.

Well, I suppose if any one of us had pulled 1.52 billion in revenue last year out of what used to be known as literacy, we too might be sporting that bug-eyed evangelical stare.

(It worked so much better on the face of Elmer Gantry impersonated by Burt Lancaster, though -- but of course Elmer Gantry had to settle for tent shows, not shoot for the moon rockets -- and too, really, Jeff does fall a bit shy of Burt Lancaster in the "man-up" dept.)

Is that Jeff? No, he's no Burt Lancaster. Elmer Gantry must have been Burt's best role, I can't be the first to say that.

In fairness to Jeff and his kind, not that they need me, Norwegian bookshops charge more than double the US price for imported books. You can't beat a City Lights or William Stout's Architectural Bookstore, also in SF, but I can't pay that much. I'm certainly not going to buy one of Jeff's little television sets, though. I like paper; my thoughts are ephemeral enough without the books disappearing before my eyes.

I'm pretty much the same way, Artur, though it seems one is supposed to be embarrassed to admit it.

I believe our Jeff was in on the, if he did not actually himself invent, that terribly noisome Kindle business.

When I think of Kindle I think of book burning bonfires, Fahrenheit 451 & all that.

This post could never have existed had it not been for paper -- the paper employed by Thomas Wyatt or his scribe copying from a fair copy, to start with... all the way down to the 48" x 36" sheets of architectural design paper upon which one had, for reasons yet to be fully fathomed, many years ago, laboriously inscribed, in large carefully measured monastic script, a transcription of Richard Harrier's transcription from the Egerton ms.

A person who lives here and who has read virtually every novel worth reading, several times over, says she is simply unable to "read things on a screen".

I dare say this is the unvoiced position of many less courageous paper recidivists.

Since I can't see the originals, do you have any pictures of those 48 x 36 inch sheets? What a great project. Quite difficult to lay flat a piece of paper that big. There used to be a standard sheet of paper in England, that was phased out when they joined the Common Market and went decimal, called "Double Elephant". That was only 27" x 40". I liked the name.

Cottage industry has always been pretty much the name of the game hereabouts.

For years I made handmade books -- with, of course, the help of someone. I designed and inscribed them, A. stitched them together.

As to the big sheets... being an inveterate pedestrian, over the years, when I was still ambulatory and yet capable of at the same time looking about me, I found in someone's "recycling" (i.e. street trash) several sets of very large sheets containing architectural designs for a Kaiser Permanente Hospital (in Fresno, yet), rolled up much like collections of giant papyri.

I dragged these home and, again over the years, working mostly in the middle of the night (one could never do such a thing in plain sight of day), on my knees, painstakingly inscribed, on the verso sides, sets of designs presenting not only the original drafts of poems, but a good deal of related material.

There were some two dozen Wyatt scrolls.

There were various sets featuring other poets as well.

There was a set of these "scrolls" relating to the poetry of Keats. A half dozen of these, under the title "Deep Keats Scrolls", were posted here two years ago.

In case anyone's interested, the, er, iconography deployed in those scrolls often involved figurations of literary history by way of cartoon images; for example, the influence of George Herriman's Krazy Kat is pretty obvious here:

This is a thread long gone, but talking about images of oneself within images of oneself, I can't help posting our national redhead. She is wearing earrings depicting.... herself of course. And she has been around since 1921!La Vache Qui Rit.